On the run: How the Pirate Bay founders dodged Swedish justice

Monique
Wadsted, a Swedish copyright attorney representing Yellow Bird,
said she had done all that she could do in attempting to seize
Neij's remaining assets, but now it was up to the government. "I
really don't know [if this money can be recovered]," she told Ars.
"We will see. It's up to the Swedish Enforcement Agency to handle
this."

The Swedish Enforcement Authority enforces civil and criminal
judgements by collecting debts, but the agency isn't equipped to
find and seize assets outside of Sweden. Once a judgement has been
made, a creditor must apply directly to the agency with a monetary
amount due and a deadline. However, there's one major loophole.

"When it comes to your question about the Swedish Enforcement
Authority's possibility to collect assets outside Sweden, it's
almost impossible concerning private claims," wrote Henrik
Branstad, of the Swedish Enforcement Administration, in an email to
Ars. "There are some agreements among the countries in the European
Union, but outside Europe we have no authority -- so if a creditor
has a claim and suspects that the debtor has assets in another
country, the creditor has to turn to a law firm or an international
debt collecting agency."

Neij continues to insist he has no money to take. In a comment
given last month to TorrentFreak, Neij quipped, "It doesn't really matter what they
do, I still have no assets they can take."

Until early September, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg had been living
more or less quietly in Phnom Penh, Cambodia since 2008, conducting
IT work for clients both in Cambodia and Europe. Many who know
Svartholm Warg or who have met him describe him as something of a
recluse -- he preferred to spend most of his time in his apartment
above the Cadillac
Bar, in a neighbourhood frequented by expats.

"I never had the impression that he's been hiding or something
like that, I think he's just enjoying his life here," said Niklas Femerstrand, an
acquaintance of Svartholm Warg's, who also lives in the Cambodian
capital as a developer for a local internet provider. (Femerstrand
also describes himself as a programmer for Flattr, the micropayment
platform company founded by Peter Sunde.)

"When The Pirate Bay first started, Gottfrid was [already
living] in Mexico, so it's not unusual for him not to live in
Sweden," Femerstrand added. However, when asked if he knew how
Svartholm Warg was able to afford his £465-a month two-bedroom
apartment in Cambodia, Femerstrand said: "I would rather not
comment."

According to reports in Cambodian media, Svartholm Warg had a
falling-out with a British entrepreneur named Kit Hargreaves, who
ran a video game company that sold products to casinos. According
to an article in the 7 September 2012 edition of the Phnom
Penh Post, Svartholm Warg was tasked with being Hargreaves'
"online security mastermind."

Svartholm Warg and Hargreaves apparently got into a disagreement
over the former's drug use and the latter's reluctance to pay what the two
had initially agreed. The company has since dissolved.

Femerstrand said he was aware of Svartholm Warg's drug use --
declining to state which drugs he took -- but "wouldn't call [his
drug use a] problem," adding that Gottfrid "is known for his
recreational use of drugs."

This account was confirmed by Peter Hogan, the editor of Khmer440, an English-language
expatriate website and discussion board. Hogan first encountered
Svartholm Warg on his website, where the Swede posted under the
name "Agrippa." Initially, Hogan said, Svartholm Warg was warmly
welcomed by the expat community in Cambodia.

"He was an informative and helpful poster and would actually
come to other poster's homes in his spare time to fix their
computers for free -- a nice guy and super smart," Hogan wrote in
an email to Ars. "We were very fond of him."

During this halcyon period, Svartholm Warg apparently offered to
host Khmer440 on PRQ, the Swedish hosting company that he had
helped found. Khmer440 took him up on the idea, but things later
went downhill, Hogan said.

"Sadly, [Svartholm Warg] got messed up on drugs while working
for Kit [Hargreaves] and it changed his personality a lot; he
stopped posting on 440 and we lost touch with him," Hogan added.
"[Svartholm Warg] had offered to host 440 on his own personal
server back in Sweden and it ended up a nightmare for us as he kept
forgetting to pay the fees and we were going down all the time and
couldn't get hold of him to fix things. In the end, he was a total
recluse and I'm guessing the only people who had dealings with him
were his dealers and landlord."

"I guess he just gave up on people, in a physically social way,"
Femerstrand confirmed, adding that he would usually see Svartholm
Warg in his apartment a few times a month. He said that Svartholm
Warg felt harassed by Swedish authorities during and before the
Pirate Bay trial. Femerstrand also accused the Swedish Security
Service of conducting surveillance of Svartholm Warg in Cambodia,
"since [at least] March 2012." (The Swedish Security Service did
not reply to Ars Technica's request for comment.)

"He never wanted to speak on camera," said Simon Klose, a
Swedish filmmaker who has recently completed a movie on the group,
entitled TPB AFK:
The Pirate Bay - Away from Keyboard. The director told Ars
the film was set to be released in early 2013.

Klose described Svartholm Warg as a "child prodigy," who learned
to program at a young age. "He loves writing code," Klose said.

After spending extensive time with the trio -- Lundström did not
want to be part of the film -- Klose said that the men complement
each other's skills. If Svartholm Warg, who handled the primary
programming for the group, was the brains, Klose said that Fredrik
Neij was the "hands" and that Peter Sunde -- the group's long-time
spokesperson -- was the "mouth."

"Fredrik is more of a hardware guy," Klose told Ars over Skype.
"He is much more of a person -- he's the guy with a screwdriver.
He's the hands on the machines. And Peter [Sunde] is a people
person."

Svartholm Warg did not attend his appeals trial in Sweden, which
is why Neij's attorney Jonas Nilsson says Svartholm Warg was not
included on the appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

Just as the Swedish government stepped up the pressure on Neij
this year, it has gone after Svartholm Warg even more directly.
Last month, Svartholm Warg was deported from Cambodia on a visa violation and sent back
to Sweden. Svartholm Warg continues to be held in custody by
Swedish authorities who have kept him in connection with a hacking
episode against Logica, a Swedish IT firm that works with the
Swedish tax authority.

Earlier this year, Logica was hit by an online attack that
resulted in around 9,000
Swedes (Google Translate) having their personal identity number and names released to the
public. Normally in Sweden, such data is made public, but there are
cases where that data can be hidden -- and it was this hidden data
that was targeted in the hack. (However, there has been some
speculation in the Swedish media that the data may not have been
genuine).

The International Public Prosecution Office in Stockholm has not
yet charged Svartholm Warg with a crime.

Of the four, Peter
Sunde has been the most outspoken about the case. That's
probably because between August 2005 and August 2009 he was the
spokesperson for The Pirate Bay. Both on his lawyer's appeal to the
European Court of Human Rights and on his own website, he declares
his "home base" to be in Berlin. Last month, Sunde wrote to Ars
saying that he was in Sweden "for the moment," but prosecutors
haven't kept close tabs on him.

"I'm not sure where Peter Sunde is at the moment," Håkan Roswall, the chief prosecutor
from the trial, told Ars. "He has a lot of work in Germany."

For years, Sunde has publicly trashed the Swedish justice system
over the case against him. Sunde has repeatedly said that he will not pay any money at all. In a personal
July 2012 plea to the government for a pardon, Sunde writes that
this debt "practically means I don't have a future in Sweden as a
country, if I want to live off of anything other than breadcrumbs
or the goodwill of my friends. This debt is equivalent to exile, to
deportation. I will need to become an economic refugee from
Sweden."

He has declined donations from TPB supporters. "I don't need
much money anyhow and if I get money it will go to our opponents
since I on paper owe them 10M EUR or so," he wrote on his blog in July 2012. "I don't want to feed that
beast with any cash, especially not from people that really want to
change what's going on."

Sunde has been quite active in other projects, helping to
establish iPredator, a
Sweden-based anonymous VPN, creating Kvittar, a digital receipts
platform, and also founding
Flattr in 2010, a micropayment platform that has become
popular with a number of media organizations in Europe. Sunde has
also traveled extensively on speaking
gigs over the last few years.

Copyright attorney Monique Wadsted has told the Swedish
Enforcement Authority that Sunde may still have financial interests
in Flattr. However, in a letter dated 17 September 2012, tax
inspector Elisabeth Lustig wrote to Wadsted and said that,
following an investigation, her agency determined that Sunde was
never compensated or employed by Flattr.

Still, Wadsted alleged in the Swedish newspaper Ny Teknik (Google Translate)
that Sunde is connected to, or receives some sort of compensation
from, shell companies (called Karbon Ventures and The Chromatic
Trust) set up in the United Kingdom. Kvittar's CEO, Anna
Oscarsson, confirmed to the paper recently that Karbon
Ventures, which she says Sunde controls, owns 15 per cent of
her company.

If that allegation is true, it wouldn't be the first time that
people associated with The Pirate Bay have used immensely dodgy transactions to obscure ownership and
possible income of a business.

How has Sunde managed to avoid jail time, particularly given that he's returned to Sweden
several times in the last three years? It's not clear, and no one
involved is talking. Earlier this year, Sunde was reportedly ordered to report to a prison called Västervik
Norra for his eight month sentence. When Sunde and the others
didn't report, the Swedish Prison and Probation Service
(Kriminalvården) had the responsibility to act.

In an email sent to Ars, a representative of the Kriminalvården
explained the procedure. "If the convicted person does not report
to the prison in question at the decided date or before, the
Evaluation and Placement group issues a warrant to the local police
office," wrote Andreas Fällström. "The local police search for the
convicted person locally, and report the result of their search
back to the Evaluation and Placement group. If the convicted person
not has been encountered, a national domestic warrant to all of
Sweden's police offices is issued. If the criteria for an
international warrant lay at hand, an international warrant also is
issued in connection with the national warrant."

Due to privacy reasons, Fällström declined to comment on where
any of the Pirate Bay defendants might be in this process.

For now, Sunde remains a free man.

End Game The money the four men owe may never materialise, and the
site at the root of all the controversy has remained up. Still,
despite the many delays, Lundström has now served his time,
Svartholm Warg is in police custody, and Neij is currently targeted
by the Swedish government. It may only be a matter of time before
each of the four at least serves out his sentence.

"From a Swedish perspective, it's [legally] game over [for all
of them]," said Mårten Schultz, a law professor at Stockholm
University who has closely followed the Pirate Bay trial.
"Eventually they probably will serve time. They still have the
verdict over their heads. Their lives are affected by this -- they
cannot come home."